This was my third year attending MuleSoft CONNECT since I joined AVIO, and every year it has gotten better and better. I always look forward to attending the event and learning about new things MuleSoft has planned for the future and hearing how organizations are using MuleSoft to solve their business challenges.
 

This year was no different, so I’d like to share my 3 big takeaways from this year’s conference in Atlanta.
 

1. The Keynote: tips to become a more modern organization

For this year’s keynote, MuleSoft Founder, Ross Mason, spoke about architecting for innovation and agility. He highlighted MuleSoft’s vision for a connected future and the importance of API’s and the application network to today’s enterprises.
 

Ross, then brought Former McDonald’s Global CIO, Frank Liberio, to the stage to talk about how they used APIs and MuleSoft to overcome real problems. He shared some best practices on how enterprises could accelerate digital transformation and become a more modern organization.
 

2. The vision and roadmap for the Anypoint Platform

Every year that I attend CONNECT, I look forward to hearing what new and exciting things MuleSoft has planned for the coming year. This year during the Vision and Roadmap session, Mark Dao, Chief Product Officer, shared what we could expect to see in the IT space in the coming year, which included:
 

• New templates to be released for Flow Designer.
• API Community Manager: an extension to Anypoint Exchange to support community members with developer forums, chat, and case management.
• The addition of Government Cloud, which is a FedRAMP compliant environment.
• Enhancements to connectors and the release of new connectors.

3. Technical breakout sessions

When I was looking at the agenda before the conference, I marked 3 technical breakout sessions that I knew I was going to attend.
 

This year, I was really looking forward to the “Salesforce Integration Best Practices” breakout session because I had written a previous blog post on the same subject, How to Integrate Salesforce with MuleSoft.
 

The other 2 breakout sessions that had caught my attention included “Accelerating Digital Transformation with MuleSoft” and “How Leading Enterprises are Monitoring and Troubleshooting in Hybrid World”. These are 2 key areas that I am always focusing on for AVIO customers.
 

Here are some key insights I took away from each of the 3 breakout sessions:
 

Salesforce Integration Best Practices

• The MuleSoft approach integrating with Salesforce
• Demo of how to use APIs and MuleSoft can be effective in initiatives like Customer 360
• Using Heroku to deploy, run and manage applications

Accelerating Digital Transformation with MuleSoft

• Effective application networking in a complex ecosystem
• How different domains carry different definitions for an API layered architecture
• Integrations to legacy systems and patterns

How Leading Enterprises are Monitoring and Troubleshooting in Hybrid World

• How to leverage custom dashboards
• The best usage of Anypoint Monitoring
• Demo of how easy debugging is with Anypoint Monitoring
• Logging best practices

MuleSoft CONNECT is something that I always look forward to every year when the dates are announced. Though the event was much smaller this year since they have broken the larger conference into multiple events, MuleSoft still delivered. From meeting all the great people at the networking events and AVIO’s booth, to holding insightful conversations about the current IT landscape, MuleSoft CONNECT 2019 was a highlight for the year and I am already looking forward to MuleSoft CONNECT 2020.